Magic Objects
Counterspells Against Nachträglichkeit
The magic object of childhood—blanket, doll or bunny, the imaginary companion—may be no less magical than those charmed objects we find in faery stories and the fantasy genre; magic rings, cloaks of invisibility, a faery godmother. This magic object is wielded by the ordinary child as an enchanted defense against the intensities of a field of desire that heretofore has had unilateral influence over their life. With the acquisition of language the child becomes aware, in no uncertain terms, that the desire they share with the parental object whom they have relied upon for life itself, with whom they have shared the greatest of all intimacies, and from whom they have received the very ability to love (or not), is, in fact, prohibited by the oldest law of society: the prohibition against incest. Such desire is herewith consigned to perdition in what will be known as primal repression—according to some accounts, the formation of the unconscious itself. And yet this primal field remains an active force. The loss of the primordial object is replaced with a magic one; the child’s imagination, powered by the dark-star of nachträglichkeit (that does not obey the rules of machine-time) animates the magic object and makes of it an entire private realm of enchantment—prototypical of the artist and their art-object, the novelist and their world, or the theologian and their god. The magic object becomes the first attempt of transcendence (and the first transference) from an occult psychic field that, though it is always repressed, can never be escaped or forgotten.
